Taking pictures of everything to save the world

I want to take some time to explain through this blog some of the challenges faced by visually impaired individuals in India, and invite us all to look to technology for a solution.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Premanjali Foundation in Bangalore, India, which is an educational centre for visually impaired students, most of them in high school or college. It was there that I began to understand the challenges faced by these students. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine your daily routine. Imagine waking up in the morning, brushing your teeth, cooking yourself breakfast. How would you get to work or school? How would you find the people you need to help you do this? The unfortunate truth is that of the 40 million moderately to severely visually impaired (MSVI) people in India, many of them live alone and are forced to rely on the kindness of strangers.

You might justify to yourself, as I first did, that Braille is a solution. But while it works on paper, true Braille literacy rates are well below 10%, and braille printers literally cost thousands of dollars, making them simply inaccessible to people in India. In many ways, Braille education becomes a luxury for most people who can't afford the month-long training classes or printers worth more their weight in gold.

For the same reason, sophisticated smart canes don't work in busy bazaars in India, and most people have trouble understanding the robotic American accents of the screen readers like Jaws and NVDA.

But there is hope! Recently, we have seen firsthand how the availability of AI has made processing large amounts of data much much more accessible, and the price of mobile technology only continues to decrease. If only we could find a way to harness the power of technology to make a solution for the blind that would truly understand them as individuals and better suit the needs of this unique market.

This is all very possible, and has been the mission of Project EyeSight for many years now, ultimately culminating in AI-powered accessibility tech costing less than a small pizza! I believe that, if we come together in this hour of need, with our own creative ideas and implementations, you and I together can help solve this problem and make the world a better place!

PS: I just wanted to say I had some inspiration for the title of this post from one of Mark Rober's excellent videos. You should definitely check them out if you haven't yet!